


Forgotten, Almost Lost

by SiladhielLithvirax



Category: Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018), Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Fluff, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-24
Updated: 2020-09-24
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:35:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26625277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SiladhielLithvirax/pseuds/SiladhielLithvirax
Summary: Pulling it back towards her Rey studies the grimy old thing. It’s very old, almost pre-Empire tech. There are resistors and a memory card she’d often seen in the hollowed-out banks of old destroyers. She could get it to work. She’s done it before, rebuilt something impossible to feel the sparks and calm that spread over her as she thinks of nothing but wires and connections.Rey finds an old databank on board the Falcon. She fixes it.
Relationships: Rey & L3-37
Comments: 11
Kudos: 33
Collections: Star Wars Fanfiction Discord





	Forgotten, Almost Lost

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Koumine (thesecretsavant)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesecretsavant/gifts).



> A count towards my seduction of the lovely Koumine. I forget what even started this fic, but it's finally done! Enjoy.

Rey is at loose ends. She came here to learn, to understand the strange things she could feel and see that rightly terrified her. This wasn’t Jakku, she didn’t have to spend her days climbing through wreckage and squeezing herself into the remains of battleships that crested through the sand like giant teeth. 

Here, she waited, she paced, she spent hours looking through the compartments on the  _ Falcon _ . Here, she followed an old hermit who was so far lost in his own misery and doubt that he’s abandoning the only family he has left in the galaxy. 

General Organa had sent her here to find her brother after losing Han. The thought sent an ache down her spine. Han was fun, Han was strong, Han was everything she had ever wished for a father to be, and his own son cut him down like it was nothing. Part of Rey knows she will never forgive Kylo that act.

She moves another box out of the smuggling cache in the lounge, idly wondering how many caches did they even have aboard this ship? The  _ Falcon _ was Han’s ship from a long time ago, before he met Leia, before it took a run at the Death Star, before a lot of things, when Han was just an orphan like herself searching for a place in this messed up galaxy. Caught in her musings Rey almost misses it when something pings off the floor as she shifts the box in her hands to make room for another. 

A dirty old databank sits there and something is tugging at the edge of her senses, something she can’t fully pinpoint, like a single grain of sand in the wind. Picking it up the dusty old object it seems to be the memory bank from somewhere. It’s old tech, gritty with dirt, and what smells a bit like rancid spice. There’s something written on one edge, a smudged old thing, only growing worse as she rubs at it with her tunic to get the spice off. L3-37. Some designation or abbreviation is what she assumes, reaching over to place it back in the box. 

Before her hand drops the databank there’s a poke she feels in her bones, like when she’d turn the right way just before seeing a missed piece of machinery in the monolithic ships dotting the deserts. Her hand hesitates over the box, still holding on to the databank right above it. 

Pulling it back towards her Rey studies the grimy old thing. It’s very old, almost pre-Empire tech. There are resistors and a memory card she’d often seen in the hollowed-out banks of old destroyers. She could get it to work. She’s done it before, rebuilt something impossible to feel the sparks and calm that spread over her as she thinks of nothing but wires and connections. 

It’s not like she’s doing anything else important, and Chewie had given her free rein over whatever was found in the smuggling holds. It didn’t look like anything very important and part of Rey wanted to know more of Han, even if it was a tiny piece of the famous smuggler contained on an old databank. 

  
  


Hours later finds Rey with a mish-mash of wires and connections in the cockpit, limbs folded into the pilot’s chair, scrolling through lines of code. It’s not quite the rebellion intelligence or hyperspace routes she’d first assumed when cleaning up the piece of tech, but instead what she finds is beauty.

A curious twist of code here that speaks of care, a peculiar use of syntax over there that speaks of someone meticulously piecing together what she’s beginning to think is the mind of a droid. Something chewed up and spit back out in pieces, but lovingly cared for and constructed into a whole that wasn’t quite finished, wasn’t quite complete. 

Rey leans back into the chair with a huff. It was a droid. Not any specific type of droid Rey could recognize, there were bits of astromech in the grammar, but navigator in the structure and espionage protocols threaded throughout. Whatever type of droid it had once been was unique, a patchwork of thoughts and processes that had traveled through the galaxy and come out better, through circumstances that made its unique programming integral. 

Part of Rey was giddy with excitement at something new, her own experiences leaving her still so unused to anything that wasn’t yellow sand and gray steel monuments to a time gone by. 

Another part of her was whispering in her bones,  _ change _ , it said,  _ friend, _ it whispered. She’d already left behind Finn and Poe, her connection to them pulled taught and thin through messages via BB-8. Chewie was too forlorn to be much company currently, mourning his partner, and she did not begrudge him that, the time he spent away from the knick-knacks and memories she pulled from the Falcon. Luke was barely a blip to her, a curious feeling of void and sorrow. 

Putting this together wouldn’t be the work of hours anymore. It would be an endeavor, to create something that might live up to the potential contained in strings of text. But that same whisper was urging her on, urging her to put down the screen with lines of personality scrolling by and to scavenge, to find what might work and build something she could rely on and breathe life into on this wet, miserable little outcropping of grass and stone. 

Disconnecting the main data transfer line from the ships processing port, Rey decided. Luke Skywalker couldn’t lend judgment on who she would be, couldn’t bar paths from her that were hers alone to walk. There was a resonance under her skin, there was a tingling in her fingertips. She didn’t fully know what the Force was, but nothing had seemed to speak to her as much as circuits and wires and sparks. Luke may not want to teach her what he knew, but she’d followed her own path her entire life, and she wasn’t about to deviate now. Rey knew who she was, and that was Rey of Nowhere, and she could do this. 

  
  


Burning through the calluses on your fingers probably wasn’t an auspicious sign for this new endeavor she’d started on. Tossing the now useless capacitor to the side she reached over to grab a new one from the pile of scavenged items she’d amassed over the past few days. 

Luke still refused to engage with her, following his routine and sitting for hours in the grass and stone, eyes closed. A rather large part of her wanted to test that calm, unflappable reserve, poke him with her staff to see if he’s actually asleep or  _ meditating _ . 

Most of the frustration she channels into the work currently under her hands. She’s almost done, a mishmash of droid parts perhaps wasn’t the prettiest vessel for the mind she’s been rebuilding, but it would have to do until they could go and find better replacements somewhere. Somewhere without  _ fish. _

Heaving herself up off the floor and away from the patchwork body still lying there with its processors exposed. Making her way to the cockpit Rey makes sure to really appreciate the ship that’s now for all intents and purposes, her home. Certainly better than the old AT-AT she’d laid claim to in Jakku. 

Spending the last couple of days working on coding and building, she has a new appreciation for the personality of this old ship. Running a scan through the  _ Falcon _ ’s code brought her the biggest help in piecing together what remained of the droid she’s been so carefully bringing to life. 

A not insignificant part of the droid was in the ship, to Rey’s surprise. Whatever happened to have that happen over the years was lost in the powerless memory banks of the droid, but copying over bits of navigation and personality had endeared Rey to the ship and the droid even more. 

The compiler was still running on the last of the additions Rey had made to the protocols, and she settled down in the pilot's chair to wait it out a bit and give her burned fingers a break. Looking out over the sea was nice, she decided. 

Not quite the same waves and winds as the rolling dunes of Jakku, but water was so very amazing in its own right. There were colors reflected from the deep, blues and greens and blacks visible when the suns hit the planet in a certain way or the mists obscured the entire sky. There were islands in the distance she could see, and maybe one day she’d grab Chewie and venture out over the waves. 

It had taken her time to realize she wasn’t ever going back to Jakku. It still hurt to think of her parents and wonder if they’d ever actually come back for her. Whoever they were, Rey wasn’t sure she wanted them to anymore. She’d seen the galaxy, the First Order, Starkiller base. Running back to Jakku to wait for unknown parents to come get her seemed cowardly now. Like sticking your head in the sand when there’s still a Gnaw-jaw nearby. 

The processor on the  _ Falcon  _ pinged a complete, and Rey looked down at the once-grimy datapad that held a soul as real as hers. Maybe this droid would like to go see the stars with her. 

  
  


The body was finished, the power source finagled into the not-quite-right chassis, and the databanks were loaded in. It had taken a little over a ten-day to finish this task, but the time to think and not think was really quite nice for a change. She’d gone from the deserts of Jakku to the jungles of Takodana to D’Qar to Starkiller so fast she thinks she barely breathed before jumping after Finn and Poe. So much has changed for her in so little time that getting her head on straight was something she didn’t realize she needed until it was happening. 

Whoever this droid turns out to be, they’ll probably be the same. Jumping who knows how long into the future and having to contend with the rash of changes in the galaxy was hard on someone from nowhere. On a companion that traveled the stars with Han it was sure to be worse. 

Regardless, Rey is excited. She completed something, she built something with her own two hands and breathed life into something just as lost and alone as she was, forgotten somewhere in a desert or a smuggling hold. 

Flipping the switch to bring the power source online feels like a zing of electricity, that curious nudge still tugging at her in all directions, as if it’s feeding off her own excitement and anticipation. 

The head she’d scrounged from an old radial maintenance droid twirls a bit on the neck, the online lights to the side cycling through different tracks and patterns. 

Suddenly it goes still, and a jolt runs through the limbs that makes Rey start forward from the box she’d dragged over to watch the process. 

Then there’s a high pitched whine from the vocoder she’d salvaged from an old droid torso that slowly coalesces into a rough feminine voice and- 

“-ando? Lan-ando? Lando? Lando, my mod- Lando? Lando? Who the kriff are you?” 

Rey was still staring in shock as the droid whipped around to face her, arm still raised before she hastily brought it down by her side and showed both open palms. She didn’t put any weaponry in the droid when rebuilding, but waking up in an unfamiliar place would be disconcerting for anyone. 

“I- I’m Rey.” 

“Well,  _ Rey _ , who the kriff are you, and where’s Lando?” the wealth of sarcasm conveyed by a repurposed vocoder was patently unfair in Rey’s opinion.

“I’m sorry, I don’t- who is Lando?” 

The droid was still obviously checking over its new body, gears and rotors were whirring and clicking in the background while the optical sensor was wholly fixed on Rey.    
  
“Lando Calrissian. You didn’t answer my question.” Came the immediate flat rejoiner. 

“Oh-um - sorry, did you say Lando Calrissian? The famous smuggler?” Rey knew that name. The same way she knew Han’s when they first met. There were few stories shared in Niima Outpost, but there were enough shady types stopping by that she’d grown up on stories of Han Solo, Mirax Terik, and Prince Xizor. 

“Well, if he’s known as famous then we obviously haven’t been doing our job right. And you,  _ Rey _ , still haven’t answered my question.” 

“I’m just Rey. From Jakku.” 

“That’s a sandy bit of nowhere. Why are you on my ship?” 

“This is your ship? The  _ Falcon  _ was Han Solo-”

A riotous laugh fell out of the droid in front of her, shifting from a high pitched whine to something closer to the gruff voice from earlier as it went on. 

“Han Solo? That little boy? No, The  _ Millenium Falcon _ is Lando Calrissian’s ship. Or was. Tell me, what dating system does this planet use, because I’ve never heard of an ABY.” 

“After the Battle of Yavin, where the Galactic Empire lost to the Rebel Alliance.” 

“Oh dear. You’re going to have to connect me to the net sometime soon for an update I think. What the kriff happened to my circuits?” 

“I rebuilt you. I found your old databank in a smuggling hold and decided to rebuild it. Someone had already done quite a lot of work on it, and I found the remnants in the  _ Falcon’s  _ system.” Someone who obviously cared a lot she doesn’t say. If this droid doesn’t even know the fall of the Galactic Empire then Rey doesn’t know who the droid might be looking for. 

“Thank you, for not sticking one of those damnable restraining bolts on my head to start. And once I get an update into whatever the hells year it is you’re going to rework some things. Starting with my right leg, did you- that’s a CM-475 droid leg. Why have you put a CM-475 droid leg on me?” 

The conversation was not going in any sort of direction Rey could follow, and that pesky tugging hadn’t stopped and seemed to be laughing at her confusion. 

“I could only use what’s on the ship,” came her quiet reply. Rey had a million questions, why Lando? Why wasn’t this Han’s ship? Just who was this droid? But none of them seemed able to pass her lips, still sitting stock still on the cargo box she’d dragged over what seemed like a lifetime ago. 

“I suppose that will have to do for now. Get me to a connection, Lando is probably bereft without me.” The droid eased herself up on shaky rotors, slight jockeying as it obviously got used to the additions to its movement from the different pieced of tech Rey had cobbled together. 

“What’s your name?” 

The droid stopped its movements and turned it’s optical input back to her from where it had started heading to the cockpit. It obviously knew the ship rather well even waking up after who knew how many years of being disabled. 

“I am L3-37, companion of Landonis Balthazar Calrissian, and we are going to find that idiot.” 

Great. Just what she needed, another no-doubt old man to chase after. 

  
  
  
  
  



End file.
